Once Bitten, Twice Dead

  Once Bitten/OSIPOWICZ

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ed Butcher gave a mighty chop. The cleaver sliced right through the hindquarter.

  “I still have it,” he said admiring his muscular arms, especially the right one which resembled some of the slabs of beef surrounding him. “Fifty years old, and I can still man the ship,” he said to no one in particular since he was alone in the back room of his butcher shop.

  Ed was the CEO of a chain of meat markets called, “HERE’S THE BEEF,” which he had built into a multi-million dollar business. Butcher had been true to his name and had begun his career working right out of high school; within six years he had owned that store, and within sixteen years he had owned five stores. Now his stores were located in ten US states and three countries in South America. Currently Ed had future plans for expanding into Europe and Asia.

  He chopped a dozen more steaks into nice slices and packaged them in minutes. At first when Cyril Caruso, his head butcher had called in sick last night, Ed was miffed. He always pushed his employees, giving them only three sick days a year. Cyril has wanted to take off yesterday because his bad cold was getting worse, but Ed firmly told him he already had taken his limit of days off. But then yesterday while waiting on a customer, Cyril fainted, and it didn’t seem fake. So when Cyril called, Ed generously said, “Sure, take the whole day, but make sure you’re back to work the next day.” After the fainting incident Ed’s primary thought was why couldn’t Cyril have completed the sale? There was such a commotion that Ed probably lost an hour’s business. Some people were just weak sissies. Where would Ed be if he gave in to his own weaknesses? He’d still be slabbing meat at his first market instead of being one of the richest men in America.

  Of course few people knew just how wealthy Ed was. He drove a five year old used car, lived in a modest neighborhood, and constantly pretended he was on the verge of poverty. His other markets throughout the world all had different names so they couldn’t be connected back to him. HERE’S THE BEEF was the corporate name on each of the contracts, but each sign on the outside of each market had a different name. Even his wife Larabella didn’t know about Ed’s holdings because he always played the victim when he was around her.

  Larabella especially didn’t know about Ed’s “get-away” weekends. He always told her he was going away on business, but often he flew to countries like Dubai and spent thousands of dollars on wine, women, and song. Ed was never cheap when it came to himself. Yes he had had quite a pleasant life lately, except for. . .but he didn’t want to think about that. Lately Ed had gotten a little portly and a little jowly, but he told his customers he had gotten “beefy” from eating his own product. In truth, he never ate the crap that he bought.

  Ed couldn’t help but smile at his own cleverness as he finished off the last group of chops and ribs. Everything was now ready for the day’s business. And tomorrow Cyril would be in at this ungodly five o’clock A.M. hour to get that day’s products ready. Ed still had a half hour before the store opened, and he was liking the quiet time he was having. His son was getting to be more of a pain every day, and even Larabella was becoming more demanding. Even though Ed schmoozed with his customers for business reasons, he mostly liked to be by himself. All through his life he had found most other people to be like little children, so naïve and trusting. The only person Ed himself wanted to trust was Ed himself.

  He did have to admit that his nearly two hours of chopping had tired him out. He was definitely getting older. Just last month his doctor had warned Ed that his indulgent lifestyle was taking its toll. But Ed was not going to slow down. What was the point of life anyone, if not to give yourself as much pleasure as you wanted? When Cyril had called, Ed’s first thought was to get one of his other lackeys to go in this morning, but he was curious to see if he still “had it” with the cleaver in his hand. And again, as Ed had done the last thirty years of his life he had met the challenge. He was still on top.

  As Ed was washing his hands in the drain sink, he thought he heard a sound around the corner. Maybe that damn night janitor had left that back door open again. It’s about time I fired him, Ed muttered to himself.

  Around that corner, all Ed saw was a raised arm and a firm hand holding the still bloody cleaver. He closed his eyes and never opened them ever again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Raven knew this wasn’t going to be a good day. Her first day on the job, and she was already an hour late. She was supposed to be at headquarters by 7:00, but when her glazed eyes gazed at the clock near her bedside, it said 7:55. She quickly called Henry.

  When Raven had spent the two months at the station for her training, Henry Gullick would have been the last person she would have chosen for her partner. The first time she met him, he told her that her name-tag was slightly tilted. “Sloppy dress reveals a sloppy mind,” he said. In future weeks he would come over and straighten papers on her desk, comment that her shirt was too wrinkly, and her shoes should be shined. He never had a nice thing to say to her.

  Henry, however, did not discriminate. Raven was a rookie, but Henry was not trying to discourage her because he was the same way to everyone else. During a staff meeting, he even made a comment to Chief Brown that there was a spot on his shirt. Maybe Raven had been paired with Henry because no one else wanted him. She wondered if even his mother loved him.

  So, still in bed when she called Henry she got what she expected—an explosion.

  “What!! You just woke up?? Well, Officer Stolle, I’m glad you’ve started off your career so punctually. Get your ass down here as fast as you can, or better still meet me at the meat market on Clawson Ave., you know the one near the Farmer’s Market. There’s been a murder. That is, if you can spare the time.”

  Raven leaped out of bed, and of course tripped over the damn dog. That was the dog’s name: DAMN. Raven thus always felt justified calling him, “my damn dog.” Raven’s stumbling propelled her into the door to her bedroom, where her chin rammed the end of the doorframe and began to bleed.

  “Damn!” Raven shouted. The dog barked. “Not you, you idiot” What am I doing, shouting at my dog?? My first day as a policewoman in Philadelphia, and I’m already in shambles. Raven ran cold water on her cut and plastered a band-aid on it. Then she brushed her teeth. Her mother had always told her to brush her teeth before she went out in public. “Bad breath is the modern sin,” he mother used to say.

  A year ago mom had ended up having no breath as cancer killed her six months after diagnosis. Raven still didn’t know how she felt about that. Here she was only twenty-five, and her mother was gone. Was this to be the continuation of the Stolle curse that her dad had foretold about them all? In contrast to her serious mother, Raven’s dad, Charley was totally light-hearted, always kidding. When Raven was five and asked him why he had named her that, his only reply was, “You didn’t want to be named Crow, did you?”

  Charley had lost two brothers in an auto accident when he was sixteen, which left him with a gimp left leg. It was then that he first came up with the Stolle curse. “God picks out certain people,” he said one day to her and her brother. “When you are all-powerful like God is, it gets boring, so He has to exert some of his influence in order to feel good. He selects certain people to rain down destruction on, like Job in the Bible. The lesson is, keep having faith, maybe not necessarily faith in God, but at least faith in something: Goldfish crackers, the Stock Market, or Clint Eastwood. And if faith in those things fails, then for sure keep faith in yourself.”

  Charley told me this when I was eight, Raven mused, and I kept having faith even after he died a year later when a piano fell on him. That’s right, with irony which he never lived to appreciate, my father was walkin
g past an apartment building where movers were lowering a grand piano from the third floor onto the street. Of course the rope broke, and witnesses said my father made an attempt to leap out of the way, but his gimp leg gave way and all thousand pounds of potentially good music crushed him. Mercifully, it seemed that he had died instantly.

  Even though I was an orphan before my tenth birthday, my older brother, Mark, took good care of me, and since then my dad’s words have always stayed with me. Yes, today had begun as a disaster, but I was going to have faith.

  My faith became somewhat shaken in the next two minutes when my toothbrush broke in half—too fervent brushing, I guess—and I scraped the band-aid off my chin causing more bleeding. Could a person bleed to death from the chin area?? I finally stopped the flow, and by this time it was nearly 8:30. I got to the meat market by 9:00 only by running two red lights. Not good to break the law, especially if you’re a cop.

  Maybe I became a cop because despite losing my parents at an early age, I felt I still had been blessed. My dad, with his faith, had invested heavily in the stock market and when he had died he had left my mother and me a considerable amount of money. As of a year ago, it was now all mine. Luckily when I inherited it, I drew it out of the market and so I didn’t suffer during the recent stock downturn. I didn’t know what to do with all that money, so while I decided, I kept the cash in a large suitcase in my closet. That may seem silly, but remember what’shapp ened to the banks the last couple of years. Maybe because my father was hit by a falling piano I’ve never felt there was any such thing as a safe place.

  Oh, yes, it was actually both my brother and I who inherited the money when my mother died, but Mark was already a working journalist in New York City, and he said he didn’t need the money. Besides, he told me he’s always been mainly interested in ideas, and money can’t buy those.

  As for myself, a year ago I knew I had enough money that I wouldn’t have had to work for a long time, possibly my entire life. But maybe I also am somewhat idealistic like my brother, and at that time I thought, why not “give back to society,” as they say. I couldn’t see myself rushing into a burning building or standing in front of a bunch of brats, so I settled on the police force. And what a fine beginning I was having in that career!

  Arriving at the Clawson Avenue market and unable to find a parking space, I double-parked, again breaking the law. I had seen Henry pacing up and down in front of the meat market, so I thought I’d better be getting into his sight as quickly as possible.

  “Good job, Stolle, you’re only 114 minutes late for work today.”

  I expected that first barrage, but Henry kept it up. “I brought the squad car—you can ride with me today. And by the way, that’s an attractive bandage on your chin. Did you wear it especially for me?”

  I don’t know where my response came from. “Shut your face, Henry. You look bad without a band-aid.”

  I thought I saw a look of surprise on Henry’s face. Maybe if Job in the Bible had tried to fight against his afflictions, they might have gone away faster.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I had never seen a person with a meat ax stuck to his head. It looked like a cleaver-throwing contest gone awry.

  “He’s definitely dead, Henry.”

  “Now I know why I’m fortunate to have you as a partner, Raven Stolle. You have splendid powers of perception.”

  “Thank you. What do we have here so far?”

  “Well, apparently the victim was getting ready for the day’s business, chopping up some chops before he got chopped. His name is Ed Butcher—yes, I know, and my name is Henry Policeman. That’s actually the dude’s name. We’ve contacted his wife, and of course she told us that her husband had no enemies. That story was repeated by Ed’s helper, Cyril Caruso. He said Butcher was a fine man to work for. Caruso usually did this early work, but he had called in sick today and Ed was subbing for him. Larabella filled us in on all the details.”

  “Larabella??”

  “That’s his wife’s name. You should talk, with a name like ‘Raven.’”

  “I always wanted to be named, ‘Henry.’”

  “You are a wiseass, aren’t you?”

  That seemed to be a rhetorical question, so I ignored it. I knew from my crime classes that we should try to find a motive. “Now that Ed’s dead, who gets the store—maybe the wife, or the hired hand?”

  “Neither. Larabella told us she doesn’t know the first thing about the business, and Cyril said he’s going to look for work elsewhere. So it seems that neither had any design on gaining opportunity from Ed’s business ‘departure.’”

  “What do we do now, Henry?”

  “Haven’t you been reading the manual, Ms. Stolle? The part that says what to do when stymied at the beginning of a case?”

  “I must have missed that part.”

  “See that building across the street?”

  I looked through the window at a thin slice of bricks, suppressed on both sides by larger buildings. “The shop with the red awning?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s where we’re headed next.”

  I was beginning to think that Henry had noticed a clue that I had missed. After all, I was a rookie and had arrived two hours late to the crime scene. As we walked across the street, Henry said, “Until we actually wrap up this case, Stolle, much will be a mystery. In that shop is something I know for sure, and we’ll get some satisfaction there. I’ll show you how to investigate a case.”

  Could Henry already be on his way toward solving the crime, possibly interviewing a key witness??

  We walked into a tiny coffee shop with five stools and three side tables. Henry sat and ordered two powdered donuts and a cup of hot chocolate. “Since this is your first day on the job, Stolle, I’ll buy. What’re you having?”

  “Just an orange juice.”

  “Come on Stolle, eat hearty. Don’t be shy.”

  “All right.” A bowl of raisin bran and two milks later I still didn’t know what we were doing in this place, called “The Silver Spoon.”

  “Are we here to watch a suspect?”

  “As I had said, obviously you haven’t paid close attention to the police manual. Let me quote it. On one of the early pages it says, ‘When you have no clues, stop investigating and first satisfy your primitive needs. Then, once refreshed, leap back into the fray.’ This place makes the best donuts I’ve ever tasted—I’ve been coming here for years.”

  I felt embarrassed. I probably deserved Henry’s making fun of me since I had been showing my over-eager inexperience by wanting to solve the case in the first hour. However, deep down, I felt I didn’t deserve his little “cute” joke. Maybe it wasn’t going to be too easy to be the partner of Henry Gullick.

  After sitting there for a complete hour while I nudged a couple of soggy raisins around my bowl and Gullick ordered a second cup of hot chocolate, the man finally pushed back from the counter and said, “All right, we’re ready to investigate.” I didn’t know what exactly that meant, but now I was afraid to make any kind of comment. Let my fearless leader show me the path.

  That path was strewn with impassible boulders and sharp stones because for the next two weeks we got nowhere. We checked with Ed Butcher’s relatives, the people he did business with, and delved into his assets but could come up with nothing suspicious. Ed was just this “good guy” who had been a success in the meat packing industry. He had many holdings but it all seemed legal, and the employees we were able to interview said he was a strict boss but fair. Again it seemed that Ed had no enemies lurking in the shadows.

  We did discover that Ed had $270,000 on hand at one of the local banks, and his total assets, with stocks and properties, was close to two million dollars. Pretty good for just slicing meat. I told Henry, “I never realized there was so much money to be made in this kind of business.”

  “People have to eat,” was all Henry said.

  As we
continued our investigation, Henry hardly talked to me. At times he appeared to be having some kind of internal monologue, which I wasn’t privy to. During these weeks, we had possibly talked to twenty-five people, but if Henry was developing some kind of theory about the murder, he was keeping it to himself. After that first day at the coffee shop I was hesitant to ask him what he was thinking, so we spent most of our days walking and sitting side by side in silence.

  However, I was developing my own theory. We had discovered that Ed Butcher was enjoying quite a lavish lifestyle with gambling trips to Monte Carlo and hobnobbing on the exotic beaches of the Riviera. Ed seemed to love parties—for his son’s sixteenth birthday the celebration had cost over $110,000 since he had flown him and his guests to Rome for a five day bash.

  His wife, Larabella, had told us that her husband had always been like this. “He would tell me when he left on the weekends that he was going on a business trip, but I knew he was just going to indulge in the high life. When we were first married he told me, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die—or even sooner than tomorrow.’ Before he died, Ed had done his share of ‘being merry.’”

  “You didn’t go with him on those trips?”

  “Rarely. I just didn’t like that way of living. I was raised with simple family values. Ed’s way of life was all his own. I was separate from it.”

  I wondered if Larabella had gotten too separated from her husband, or if she resented all of his self-gratification. I still didn’t see any strong motive for murder, but I was going to keep Larabella in mind.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Just when I thought our case couldn’t be any bleaker, we got called into handling another murder. Randall Procopius died what must have been a horrible death.

  When Henry and I were summoned to the Procopius mansion in the Germantown section of Philly, going up the winding driveway I could see a huge structure appearing in the distance. The massive stone lions on either side of the entrance gate, and then the tall pillars guarding the double doors of the gleaming white three story edifice, all seemed to proclaim, “You are approaching the residence of an important person.”